Seattle
— What makes a man a man? How much of our sex
differences are cultural, how much hard-wired biology?
Who better to ask than Max Wolf Valerio — a
49-year-old man who was once a woman?
You're probably asking
yourself the same questions everyone asked me when I said
I was writing about a female-to-male transsexual: Did
doctors attach a penis, and does it work? We'll get to
that, but, as Valerio discovered, maleness is not nearly
as phallocentric as Freud would have us
believe.
Masculinity, Valerio
says, is hormonal and injectable. Testosterone alone was
enough to take him most of the way through his one-way
journey to manhood, which he chronicles in "The
Testosterone Files," to be released this month by Seal
Press.
Born as a girl named
Anita, she thought she was a boy and only reluctantly
accepted being a very tomboyish girl. She grew into a
tall and exotic redhead — part Hispanic, part
Blackfoot Indian — who favored black hair dye and
motorcycle jackets.
Now, as Max, he says, no
one ever thinks he's anything but a guy. When he goes to
transsexual meetings, people either don't know why he's
there or assume he's trying to become a woman. He wrote
the book, he says, to offer his perspective on the nature
of masculinity and femininity, culture and biology, and
the war between the sexes.
Valerio had always been
attracted exclusively to women. But living in San
Francisco, she realized over time that she was different
from other lesbians. "I thought all lesbians really
wanted to be men," Valerio says. She didn't like to be
touched sexually because she needed to fantasize that she
was a man. And unlike her lesbian friends, she was turned
on by traditionally feminine women who wore high heels,
makeup and short skirts.
Still, friends thought
she was crazy to consider a sex change. Few had heard of
female-to-male transsexuals in the early 1980s. She was
good-looking, they insisted. Why risk ending up looking
like Julie Andrews in a fake mustache?
But at 32, she started
injecting testosterone directly into her thigh. In the
next few months of injections, her jawline and waist
filled out, a beard grew, and her muscles hardened and
bulked up. She developed a ravenous appetite, and her
voice changed to a natural male one.
Living as a man, he
eventually had his breasts removed. Seventeen years
later, at 49, he still has had no surgery on his
genitals. The hormones enlarged Valerio's clitoris so
much that it grew to the size of his thumb when erect. He
says it looks much like a penis now, and he uses it to
have intercourse with his girlfriend.
Testosterone does make
the clitoris grow, and using it for sex this way is
"increasingly typical" for newly male transsexuals, says
Marci Bowers, a Colorado surgeon and expert on sex
change. A few opt for surgery that constructs a penis
from a tissue graft, she says, but it's an expensive
procedure. Others have a simpler operation called a
metoidioplasty, which extends the clitoris and makes it
more penislike.
But for Valerio, the real
surprise was the way testosterone transformed his brain.
"If I looked at an object, it seemed more defined, more
three-dimensional," he says. Words came with more effort,
and emotions became harder to articulate. His sex drive
soared.
When Valerio was still
Anita, she and her lesbian friends thought men's leering,
lustful behavior was nothing but posturing. Now, he's
felt male lust for himself.
Scientists have studied
transsexuals seeking clues to male-female brain
differences. Ruben and Raquel Gur of the University of
Pennsylvania worked with a female-to-male transsexual,
also named Max, and found that as the testosterone kicked
in, he improved on spatial-skills tests but got worse in
verbal fluency.
Their findings back up
larger studies from Europe, offering tantalizing hints to
our inborn differences. Valerio's transformation also
points to where we are the same — in our creative
drives, intellectual curiosity and humanity. Despite all
the changes, he says, "I'm still basically the same
person."
